Jared Lilly

“Most people in today’s world recognise as noble the ideas that we should love our enemies, that the strong should protect the weak, and that it is better to suffer evil than to do evil. People in the West treat such things as self-evident moral facts. Yet such values were certainly not self-evident to the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Vikings, Ottomans, Mongols or Aztecs. The reason why most people today accept those ideals as axiomatic is that we are products of the Christian revolution. Even when people hotly deny this, insisting (with some justification) that it’s the Church that has been ‘the oppressor’, the moral protest against oppression is itself rooted in Christian belief. For the Christian message is that all human beings reflect the image of God: God loved the world so much that he sent his Son to save it, and the cross proves that true power is found in weakness, greatness is attained in service, revenge only begets greater evil, and all victims will be vindicated at God’s judgement seat. That is what has been wired into the moral compass of Western civilisation. Whether we are conservatives who believe that voiceless and vulnerable babies should not have their lives ripped apart in utero, or progressives who contend that women have the right to have control over their own bodies, we are all arguing in Christian language, and we are all trading in Christian currency.”
― N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies